Children as Front Page News

Crises sometimes have unexpected effects. The massive migration of Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran and Mexican children toward the southern border of the United States has put a tragedy recently made public — but in reality in existence for for many years — at the center of the continent’s press and the rest of the world’s attention, as it has reached unexpected levels. American authorities do not know how to act, and as a result, they are going about this incorrectly from the perspective of those outside the country, as Republicans have demonstrated limitless ineptitude, having become a symbol of human evil devoid of boundaries.

On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to see Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui’s CNN program, where she interviewed Kevin de León, president pro tempore of the California Senate, who was emphatic in saying that “California will never ask for National Guard troops to be sent to the border” in order to capture undocumented migrant children. The upcoming November elections are the backdrop for these inhumane decisions driven by Republicans, who are literally willing to do anything in order to shut President Barack Obama in a small political corral. If this were a classical Greek tragedy, the thousands of captured children would constitute the victims of the characters’ actions, especially the villains’.

Thousands of kilometers away, we find another case of a boy — who has now become a man. He has not been seen yet, but the whole world knows his grandmother, Estela de Carlotto, who saw her nearly 40 years of efforts to find her grandson, who was missing after his mother was gunned down by thugs of Argentina’s then-military dictatorship, crowned with success. There are still 114 other very similar cases, but this one has the additional factor of happening to someone whose struggle in the group “Grandmothers of the [Plaza de] Mayo” has been persistent, and whose reward comes as an older woman. We already know the new chapters of this heartrending story, whose main character, the grandson, appeared voluntarily for DNA testing.

IN Guatemala, there is also a child protagonist in a case of maternal bravery. Maria José Godoy, a young woman whose bravery and will power occupy her entire slender body, has been fighting for two years to recover her son Johann, now 12 years old, whose father took him from Switzerland, where the family lived, and then kept him. The Swiss and Guatemalan justice systems have acted and, for 10 months, the matter has been in the Constitutional Court, awaiting resolution. Undoubtedly, the work of the Constitutional Court is enormous and it is only possible to move up the date when some type of willingness to resolve landmark cases exists. Other similar cases exist, but this one involves the legal systems of two separate countries.

Psychological effects are impossible to avoid in this type of case. The young migrants have suffered mistreatment during their journey, as they pass through the countries of Guatemala and Mexico, and they find themselves in poor conditions in American detention centers. At their young age, they are conscious of the risk of death if they return to their communities. It is cruel to indicate the possibility of leaving American territory to those who are in danger if they are deported. That damage has already been caused in the case of Estela’s grandson, as well as in that of the Siekavizza children and that of Johann, now shut away somewhere in Izabal. All those thousands of children are the protagonists of unique stories, as much as they are a source of pain and also hope.